Streaming Music Has an Offline Problem

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Streaming Music Has an Offline Problem

Spotify

We set up early on the beach, trying to get a good view of the famous July 4th fireworks on South Lake Tahoe. We came seriously prepared: a huge canopy to help us avoid repeating the previous day's sunburn disasters, a giant cooler filled to the brim, and every beach game we could find at the Big Kmart down the street. My primary contribution was the UE Megaboom, the barrel-shaped Bluetooth speaker with enough power and battery to turn our half of the beach into a thumping BBQ dance party.

There was just one problem—a pesky little "1x" at the top left corner of my iPhone's screen. Technically, the symbol indicates you have 2G service (party like it's 1999!), but really, the 1x is the universal indicator that you can't do nothin' on your phone. So around the circle we went, the whole dozen of us, everyone checking their phone to see if they had enough service to stream music. Nobody did. And nobody had any music stored on their phone, because why would they? It's 2015. Our day turned into a constant battle against YouTube, Spotify, and Pandora, and I don't think we ever got through a full song without interruption. It sucked.

Streaming music has an offline problem. As they've fallen all over themselves reminding us how wonderful it is to have 30 million songs only a few taps away, all for the low, low price of $10 a month, these companies have forgotten that the key to a great music experience is pressing play and hearing music. That shouldn't be as hard as they're making it.

Playing in the Bandwidth

So many apps and services are built on the assumption that we're always online. For Facebook and Twitter, that's fine: if the page doesn't load, refresh it, or give it a minute. Better yet, don't even look—let the app send you notifications when there's something you need to see. Netflix and Hulu can make a similar assumption, because you're probably watching on a Wi-Fi-connected TV or set-top box. Music is a complicated middle: We want to listen for hours, and do it everywhere. Every morning, I put on headphones and turn on music. Then I walk out the door, down the street, down the stairs into the station, onto the train, out of the station, down the street, and up the elevator into the WIRED office. If the music skips, stutters, or stops at any point? That's failure.

Failure happens way too often. General coverage is a problem, but to be fair, my particular Tahoe experience is less and less common. Fully 98 percent of Americans now have LTE access, and many other countries have even more access and faster speeds.

The biggest problem is that there are other problems. Problems like stupidly small data caps with stupidly expensive overage charges, and batteries that can't handle a full day of LTE streaming.

It's not Spotify's fault that Verizon sucks, or that Apple and Samsung can't make batteries that last a whole day. But Spotify and its kind are to blame for not recognizing that we just don't live in the future they imagine. They also miss the simple answer: Make it truly easy to listen to music offline. Instead we get—at best—hidden, deprecated options inside apps that are more useful for bouncing song to song and playlist to playlist than keeping a library of music on your device.

Let's not even get into Pandora and YouTube (by almost any measure, the two most popular ways people find music online) which don't allow for any kind of offline access whatsoever. Offering cached music requires a different license from labels, which not every service has. And the services that do allow you to store your music offline make it an unacceptably frustrating, complicated process.

Let's Take This Offline

Say you're looking at the "Deep Dark Indie" playlist on Spotify, and you come across "For You," by Rae Morris. You want to save that song to listen to on the subway, or during your next trip abroad. Here's how: Tap the three-dotted menu button, scroll down to "go to album," tap that, find and tap the "Save" button to add either the song or the album to your library, and then toggle the slider that appears to make the song available offline. But wait—you're not done yet! You have to keep the app open, because it won't sync in the background. Then, even if you do manage to download some songs, viewing only your offline tracks is painfully complicated. None of this is obvious. Believe it or not, it's also a recent addition to Spotify's app, and a huge improvement on how the service used to handle offline saving.

Why is it like this? Simple, really: Spotify doesn't want you to save songs offline. Neither does Apple Music, which makes the process just as complicated. A few, like Tidal and Rdio, are slightly better, but the options are buried even then. (Google Play Music is probably the best option for easy offline management, by the way.) These services are designed mostly to help you discover new music, not surface music you already have. They focus on radio, playlists, and recommendations, not on excellent library-management tools.

This was, in fact, the great opportunity in front of Apple Music. It could have been the perfect marriage of the two sides, the iPod library-in-a-box heritage mixed with the all-music-everywhere streaming ethos. Instead, it's mostly the latter, and only the former in a few of its most awkward interface decisions. Even using your existing music library requires ceding control to iCloud Music's matching and syncing software, which is a mess.

Service Plan

There are a dozen ways to make library management easier. Apps could take, say, a gigabyte of space, and automatically fill it with my most-listened songs. They could have a separate tab for your offline music. They could put a download button next to every song, album, and artist—I bet more people would tap that than the one that tweets the song I'm listening to. They could show you how to download music when you first log into the app. They could buffer, like YouTube does, 10 or 50 songs into the future when I have Wi-Fi. It doesn't have to be this hard.

The music service of the future requires the bandwidth of the future, the battery of the future, and the services and platforms of the future. All of those things will come true, eventually. They just haven't yet. Until then, just give us a way to listen to music offline. It doesn't have to be 30 million tracks. It can be a few playlists, a couple dozen albums, and the 200 or so songs I always need in case of a beach party emergency.

You have my money, Spotify. (And you, Apple Music. You too, Rdio.) Just give me my music. The beach is way too quiet.